Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, & various artists

Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns. I know why, they know why - we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you want to make in your classy hardcover collection of retold myths. I'm just saying.

Norse Mythology, Volume 1 is the latest in the long line of floppies and sturdier-formatted objects intending to, as far as I can tell, create sequential pictures for every last word Neil Gaiman has ever written in his long career. (Look out for Duran Duran by Neil Gaiman: The Graphic Novel!)

As is usual for this project, Gaiman wrote the original thing (in this case, the 2017 book Norse Mythology, a novel-shaped retelling of what bits of Norse mythology survived Christianity, which ain't much) and is not credited with anything at all related to this book. P. Craig Russell adapted the original thing into comics, and drew some of it - here the first two (of seven) sections. And various other people - Jill Thompson, Mike Mignola, David Rubín, Jerry Ordway, Piotr Kowalski - drew the other bits, sometimes coloring it themselves and sometimes letting others (mostly Lovern Kindzierski) do the colors.

The stories were originally published in twelve floppy issues, with multiple covers because it's the modern world and we can't have anything nice anymore, and then those were collected into three hardcovers. I'll let you figure out which of the two this one was.

(So it's exactly the same model as The Graveyard Book, for those still confused.)

Using multiple artists works a bit better here than in Graveyard, which was basically one story - this is more miscellaneous to begin with, since the stories are only vaguely in chronological order for the usual mythological reasons. And the styles work well together - they're individual, but all are working here mostly in an adventure-comics look with quite a lot of Stan-and-Jack in its DNA.

As usual with Russell's adaptations, it's very faithful, with lots of captions to use as much of the original prose as possible. As always, I find that is just fine, and probably what the paying audience wants, but it makes the whole thing just slightly plodding and obvious.

But, let me be honest: you get this book because you want more Neil Gaiman stuff, and you want it to be as Neil Gaiman-y as possible. You probably already read the underlying book, and want something as much like "exactly that, but with pictures of Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram's horns" as possible. This book delivers on that promise.

(Note: I read this book on December 15, and wrote this post on December 21. It is entirely possible that you do not want any more Neil Gaiman stuff ever again in your life. That's entirely valid, too.)